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Page 239 of 1531

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Page 239 of 1531

Friday Afternoon

TO WILLIAM MORRIS PIERSON

[1868-1870]

Of the wealth of facts and fancies
That our memories may recall,
The old school-day romances
Are the dearest, after all! - .
When some sweet thought revises
The half-forgotten tune
That opened "Exercises"
On "Friday Afternoon."

We seem to hear the clicking
Of the pencil and the pen,
And the solemn, ceaseless ticking
Of the timepiece ticking then;
And we note the watchful master,
As he waves the warning rod,
With our own heart beating faster
Than the boy's who threw the wad.

Some little hand uplifted,
And the creaking of a shoe: -
A problem left unsifted
For the teacher's hand to do:
The murmured hum of learning -
And the ...

James Whitcomb Riley

The Cemetery Nightingale

In the hills' embraces holden,
In a valley filled with glooms,
Lies a cemetery olden,
Strewn with countless mould'ring tombs.

Ancient graves o'erhung with mosses,
Crumbling stones, effaced and green,--
Venturesome is he who crosses,
Night or day, the lonely scene.

Blasted trees and willow streamers,
'Midst the terror round them spread,
Seem like awe-bound, silent dreamers
In this garden of the dead.

One bird, anguish stricken, lingers
In the shadow of the vale,
First and best of feathered singers,--
'Tis the churchyard nightingale.

As from bough to bough he flutters,
Sweetest songs of woe and wail
Through his gift divine he utters
For the dreamers in the vale.

Listen how ...

Morris Rosenfeld

Music - (Twelve Translations From Charles Baudelaire)

    Oft Music, as it were some moving mighty sea,
Bears me towards my pale
Star: in clear space, or 'neath a vaporous canopy
On-floating, I set sail.

With heaving chest which strains forward, and lungs outblown,
I climb the ridgèd steeps
Of those high-pilèd clouds which 'thwart the night are thrown,
Veiling its starry deeps.

I suffer all the throes, within my quivering form,
Of a great ship in pain,
Now a soft wind, and now the writhings of a storm

Upon the vasty main
Rock me: at other times a death-like calm, the bare
Mirror of my despair.

John Collings Squire, Sir

Stanzas

Oh, weep not, love! each tear that springs
In those dear eyes of thine,
To me a keener suffering brings,
Than if they flowed from mine.

And do not droop! however drear
The fate awaiting thee;
For my sake combat pain and care,
And cherish life for me!

I do not fear thy love will fail;
Thy faith is true, I know;
But, oh, my love! thy strength is frail
For such a life of woe.

Were't not for this, I well could trace
(Though banished long from thee,)
Life's rugged path, and boldly face
The storms that threaten me.

Fear not for me, I've steeled my mind
Sorrow and strife to greet;
Joy with my love I leave behind,
Care with my friends I meet.

A mother's sad reproachful eye,
A father's scowling brow,
But he ma...

Anne Bronte

Midsummer

After the May time, and after the June time,
Rare with blossoms and perfumes sweet,
Cometh the round world's royal noon time,
The red midsummer of blazing heat.
When the sun, like an eye that never closes,
Bends on the earth its fervid gaze,
And the winds are still, and the crimson roses
Droop and wither and die in its rays.

Unto my heart has come that season,
O my lady, my worshipped one,
When over the stars of Pride and Reason
Sails Love's cloudless, noonday sun.
Like a great red ball in my bosom burning
With fires that nothing can quench or tame.
It glows till my heart itself seems turning
Into a liquid lake of flame.

The hopes half shy, and the sighs all tender,
The dreams and fears of an earlier day,

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Day That I Have Loved

Tenderly, day that I have loved, I close your eyes,
And smooth your quiet brow, and fold your thin dead hands.
The grey veils of the half-light deepen; colour dies.
I bear you, a light burden, to the shrouded sands,

Where lies your waiting boat, by wreaths of the sea's making
Mist-garlanded, with all grey weeds of the water crowned.
There you'll be laid, past fear of sleep or hope of waking;
And over the unmoving sea, without a sound,

Faint hands will row you outward, out beyond our sight,
Us with stretched arms and empty eyes on the far-gleaming
And marble sand. . . .
Beyond the shifting cold twilight,
Further than laughter goes, or tears, further than dreaming,
There'll be no port, no dawn-lit islands! But the drear
Waste darkening, and, at length, flame u...

Rupert Brooke

Merlin II

The rhyme of the poet
Modulates the king's affairs;
Balance-loving Nature
Made all things in pairs.
To every foot its antipode;
Each color with its counter glowed;
To every tone beat answering tones,
Higher or graver;
Flavor gladly blends with flavor;
Leaf answers leaf upon the bough;
And match the paired cotyledons.
Hands to hands, and feet to feet,
In one body grooms and brides;
Eldest rite, two married sides
In every mortal meet.
Light's far furnace shines,
Smelting balls and bars,
Forging double stars,
Glittering twins and trines.
The animals are sick with love,
Lovesick with rhyme;
Each with all propitious Time
Into chorus wove.

Like the dancers' ordered band,
Thoughts come also hand in hand;
In equal cou...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Swan

Andromache, I think of you! The stream,
The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days
Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief,
The lying Simoïs flooded by your tears,
Made all my fertile memory blossom forth
As I passed by the new-built Carrousel.
Old Paris is no more (a town, alas,
Changes more quickly than man's heart may change);
Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;
The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;
The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;
The débris, and the square-set heaps of tiles.

There a menagerie was once outspread;
And there I saw, one morning at the hour
When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
And the road roars upon the silent air,
A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
On the dry pavement with his webb...

Charles Baudelaire

To Ireland In The Coming Times

Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page.
When Time began to rant and rage
The measure of her flying feet
Made Ireland's heart begin to beat;
And Time bade all his candles flare
To light a measure here and there;
And may the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon a measured quietude.
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because, to him who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of things discovered in the deep,
Where only body's laid asleep.
For the elemental c...

William Butler Yeats

The Homestead

Against the wooded hills it stands,
Ghost of a dead home, staring through
Its broken lights on wasted lands
Where old-time harvests grew.

Unploughed, unsown, by scythe unshorn,
The poor, forsaken farm-fields lie,
Once rich and rife with golden corn
And pale green breadths of rye.

Of healthful herb and flower bereft,
The garden plot no housewife keeps;
Through weeds and tangle only left,
The snake, its tenant, creeps.

A lilac spray, still blossom-clad,
Sways slow before the empty rooms;
Beside the roofless porch a sad
Pathetic red rose blooms.

His track, in mould and dust of drouth,
On floor and hearth the squirrel leaves,
And in the fireless chimney's mouth
His web the spider weaves.

The leaning barn, about to ...

John Greenleaf Whittier

Night Song At Amalfi

I asked the heaven of stars
What I should give my love,
It answered me with silence,
Silence above.

I asked the darkened sea
Down where the fishers go,
It answered me with silence,
Silence below.

Oh, I could give him weeping,
Or I could give him song,
But how can I give silence,
My whole life long?

Sara Teasdale

To The Memory Of John Keats.

The World, its hopes and fears, have pass'd away;
No more its trifling thou shalt feel or see;
Thy hopes are ripening in a brighter day,
While these left buds thy monument shall be.
When Rancour's aims have past in nought away,
Enlarging specks discern'd in more than thee,
And beauties 'minishing which few display, -
When these are past, true child of Poesy,
Thou shalt survive - Ah, while a being dwells,
With soul, in Nature's joys, to warm like thine,
With eye to view her fascinating spells,
And dream entranced o'er each form divine,
Thy worth, Enthusiast, shall be cherish'd here, -
Thy name with him shall linger, and be dear.

John Clare

The Roof

    I

When the clouds hide the sun away
The tall slate roof is dull and grey,
And when the rain adown it streams
'Tis polished lead with pale-blue gleams.

When the clouds vanish and the rain
Stops, and the sun comes out again,
It shimmers golden in the sun
Almost too bright to look upon.

But soon beneath the steady rays
The roof is dried and reft of blaze,
'Tis dusty yellow traversed through
By long thin lines of deepest blue.

Then at the last, as night draws near,
The lines grow faint and disappear,
The roof becomes a purple mist,
A great square darkening amethyst

Which sinks into the gathering shade
Till separate form and colour fade,
And ...

John Collings Squire, Sir

Ghost House

I dwell in a lonely house I know
That vanished many a summer ago,
And left no trace but the cellar walls,
And a cellar in which the daylight falls,
And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O'er ruined fences the grape-vines shield
The woods come back to the mowing field;
The orchard tree has grown one copse
Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;
The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart
In that vanished abode there far apart
On that disused and forgotten road
That has no dust-bath now for the toad.
Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

The whippoorwill is coming to shout
And hush and cluck and flutter about:
I hear him begin far enough away
Full many a time to say his say

Robert Lee Frost

The Seven Old Men

O swarming city, city full of dreams,
Where in a full day the spectre walks and speaks;
Mighty colossus, in your narrow veins
My story flows as flows the rising sap.

One morn, disputing with my tired soul,
And like a hero stiffening all my nerves,
I trod a suburb shaken by the jar
Of rolling wheels, where the fog magnified
The houses either side of that sad street,
So they seemed like two wharves the ebbing flood
Leaves desolate by the river-side. A mist,
Unclean and yellow, inundated space
A scene that would have pleased an actor's soul.
Then suddenly an aged man, whose rags
Were yellow as the rainy sky, whose looks
Should have brought alms in floods upon his head,
Without the misery gleaming in his eye,
Appeared before me; and his pupils seemed

Charles Baudelaire

Astrophel and Stella - Sonnet LXX

My Muse may well grudge at my heau'nly ioy,
Yf still I force her in sad rimes to creepe:
She oft hath drunk my teares, now hopes to enioy
Nectar of mirth, since I Ioues cup do keepe.
Sonets be not bound Prentice to annoy;
Trebles sing high, so well as bases deepe;
Griefe but Loues winter-liuerie is; the boy
Hath cheekes to smile, so well as eyes to weepe.
Come then, my Muse, shew thou height of delight
In well-raisde notes; my pen, the best it may,
Shall paint out ioy, though in but blacke and white.
Cease, eager Muse; peace, pen, for my sake stay,
I giue you here my hand for truth of this,
Wise silence is best musicke vnto blisse.

Philip Sidney

Prologue: In Darkness

    With my sleeping beloved huddled tranquil beside me, why do I lie awake,
Listening to the loud clock's hurry in the darkness, and feeling my heart's fierce ache
That beats one response to the brain's many questionings, and in solitude bears the weight
Of all the world's evil and misery and frustration, and the senseless pressure of fate?

Is it season of ploughing and sowing, this long vigil, that so certainly it recurs?
In this unsought return of a pain that was ended, is it here that a song first stirs?
Can it be that from this, when to-night's gone from memory, there will spring of a sudden, some time,
Like a silver lily breaking from black deadly waters, the thin-blown shape of a rhyme?

John Collings Squire, Sir

Humanity

What though the Accused, upon his own appeal
To righteous Gods when man has ceased to feel,
Or at a doubting Judge's stern command,
Before the Stone of Power no longer stand
To take his sentence from the balanced Block,
As, at his touch, it rocks, or seems to rock;
Though, in the depths of sunless groves, no more
The Druid-priest the hallowed Oak adore;
Yet, for the Initiate, rocks and whispering trees
Do still perform mysterious offices!
And functions dwell in beast and bird that sway
The reasoning mind, or with the fancy play,
Inviting, at all seasons, ears and eyes
To watch for undelusive auguries:
Not uninspired appear their simplest ways;
Their voices mount symbolical of praise
To mix with hymns that Spirits make and hear;
And to fallen man their inn...

William Wordsworth

Page 239 of 1531

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Page 239 of 1531